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Meaningful Data from Old Blue Chips

With a lot of attention being paid to those that are converting data into something meaningful as New York Magazine points out in Tweet Tweet Boom Boom(which has a couple cool shout outs to Alex Rainert in the article), I had to wonder about the old blue chip guys that always had data though maybe have never used it in a meaningful social way.

Two companies that come to mind are GE and IBM. And by coincidence of the last two days I’ve come across a couple good examples of things that they’re doing. GE has an interactive visualization called Fit to Perform. There’s a number of simple questions posed where a person can move icons to correspond with how they respond. The following diagram places their answer into a larger pool of answers. You can also read a brief statement about what the designer that worked on the project thought about it at FOUR INFOGRAPHICAL MORSELS NO. 6.

The example from IBM is an ad, but an ad that I think is actually quite helpful for anyone interested in understanding what data can do. Why I’ve included it here is that I think that whether you work in a large corporation or small start up, data can be turned into something more than just a visualization.